This whining about the Steam "cut" is just stupid. It costs money to host content on Steam, it's not a fucking charity. A game merely existing on Steam is getting marketing, hosting and exposure along with a host of tools that are available to developers to help create and improve the functionality of their game. None of your "math" shows us anything other than your ignorance towards what services Steam actually provides. That 30% is paying for a lot of things that you are seemingly unaware of.

The fact that they peddle shovelware that they don't even test for 30 seconds

OK, this is where this argument falls utterly flat. You argue that people should buy games from the developers and not go to Steam for hosting/etc, but then complain that developers sell crap "peddleware". This is like blaming Walmart for LG making a cheap TV and assuming that LG would not have done that if you could purchase from them directly. This makes no sense at all. Walmart didn't ask LG to make a shitty TV, LG wanted to sell you a shitty TV and would have done so no matter what store it was in. The same goes for Steam and this obsession with crap Greenlight/indie games. Steam didn't ask the developers to make shitty games, they've been doing that for decades. No one is holding a gun to your head. No one is forcing you to buy these games. You need to be as informed of a shopper on Steam as you do anywhere else.

knowingly buy stuff on Steam instead of the developer's own storefront

So then you'll be in the next GMG/GOG/etc stolen steam key sale thread badgering people for stealing from Valve too? Hypocrisy doesn't fly very far. You aren't making a very good argument here at all. I don't really understand the constant whining about Origin or having multiple storefronts/agents installed, but people whine about all sorts of stupid "first world problems" on here.

You get very defensive any time someone speaks ill of EA and it is directly related to your obsession with Battlefield games. You aren't fooling anyone :p

Comcast customers out there... Something I noticed while at my parents house... They apparently moved the public wifi options out of the modem config and onto some random page on their website (and turned the public wifi back on too). I had disabled this once before when they first announced it, so you might want to check to see that yours is still off.

If you destroyed every holy book in the world and waited a thousand years they wouldn't all come back and be exactly the same. If you destroyed every bit of science we have and waited a thousand years it would all come back exactly the same.

I love this clip. It has to be one of the more concise arguments I've seen highlighting the absurdity of believing in any particular religion.

Throughout human history, no two cultures meeting for the first time have ever shared a matching religion. We humans are quite good at creating deities to surround our different cultures and explain away the things we don't or can't understand. Science is fundamentally different. It is verifiably true no matter who discovers it, what language they speak or what ideologies they possess. We use arabic arithmetic to prove greek geometry, italian physics and french chemistry and it all works because mathematics are pure and fundamentally true.

You can find peace and solace in the words and poetry of religious books, I don't find any fault in that. Treating it "as gospel" is essentially insane, though. Especially given the widespread misconceptions about what the bible actually contains and says.

My body is my temple, the air of life lives within me and the sun provides us with the warmth and energy to sustain life.

None of this knowledge requires one holy book or the other. This is all that your religion is trying to get you to understand. It's all pagan sun worship surrounded by proverbs... gone horribly wrong.

The problems start when you try to use a work of fiction to justify real world actions.

They laid people off from the less-profitable areas of their company... this isn't hard.

Infinity Ward and Beenox haven't been relevant for like a decade and Treyarch has been spiraling the drain since MW. They are utter failures as development houses in most of our minds... and the "record breaking profits" have nothing to do with any of them. Why shouldn't they be laid off?

All of this because of people whining that they had to scroll past games they didn't want in the store. Now the same people who were whining that there was too much crap on the list are worried that their particular brand of crap won't make it to the list. Hilarious :p

It can't really end something that doesn't actually exist. There is no such thing as a naturally occurring "middle class" in any economic system. There are only 2 classes in capitalism... Employer and employee.

Skynet will kill both the employee by replacing him and the employer by putting their consumers out of work.

Snowblowers leave 1/4-1/2inch of snow behind no matter what you do. If they didn't you would either have to replace the blade every time you used it... or your sidewalk. This snow quickly forms into ice from being compacted down.

They simply don't do as good of a job. They aren't meant to, either. They aren't sold because they are more effective than shoveling, they are sold because people are lazy/old.

As a utility it would raise prices, destroy competition and innovation. What utilities have competition?

It would not raise prices. It would quite literally do the opposite because you wouldn't be feeding Comcasts pockets as much as you would pay yearly in taxes. Also, for the same reason your electric rates don't triple in the summertime, better oversight and regulation also stops things like internet fast lanes from becoming a reality.

We need people to stop pretending like there is "competition" amongst broadband providers that is somehow holding down prices. There is already little to no competition. Having 2 choices doesn't really qualify. If you walked into a Best Buy and there were only 2 different TV's on the shelf that worked in your area you wouldn't call that a highly competitive industry.

Making it a public utility doesn't magically take it all away from the corporations who built it, it merely subsidizes them to maintain and deploy it and regulates prices changes. It makes providing internet service a less attractive industry for corporations who would seek to gouge consumers. It forces industries to do what they do better to increase profits because they can't directly control the rates they charge. This fosters innovation much more than matching the price of one other regional competitor.

We are already subsidizing these corporations without reaping any benefit from it. It's time to change that.

Facebook was desperately looking for the next social expansion which explains their interest.

I imagine Facebook would have been considerably more successful had they simply launched glasses that allowed facebook live/video chat etc a la google glasses instead of pressing VR.

It's such a frustrating conversation because we all know we want it and we all thought we'd have made this technological leap it by now. Miniaturization is always the last thing to come in technological progress though, and VR needs it desperately.

IMO the biggest stumbling block for VR is that it is still essentially 2 full purchases for most people. Something to power it and the headset itself.

Until the base-model consoles and mid-range laptops are all strong enough to power a VR headset or the headset itself contains all the power to drive it... it's simply not going to gain enough traction to be worth developing on. VR also is getting little help from the movie industry because live action full VR movies are going to be nearly impossible to work out. Right now all you get are little "VR experiences" which are basically fluff. At least 3D had a simple conversion from Hollywood going for it, and even that refuses to go mainstream in the home.

VR manufacturers have also failed to bring in a single game developer to take VR seriously right now and help sell their product launch to fanboys. That's odd to me. I think someone (or maybe everyone aside from some enthusiast consumers) knows that this new "gen1" isn't going anywhere and they are all hedging their bets.

I think VR and AR are both inevitable parts of the digital experience, not some fad... it's just not ready yet.

You can find unbiased third-party coverage maps freely available online. T-Mobile on average simply has worse rural coverage in most areas but it something that they have been working on the past 2-3 years. I was wrong in my first post, T-Mobile seems to have been rated on par with AT&T this past year. They are still both chasing Verizon. Apparently, Tennessee isn't one of those areas. I'm glad that works out for you.

I am guessing that in order to grow their rural business T-Mobile specifically targetted some areas where Verizon and AT&T already had poor service.

Some of you might do well to take a sociology course and better understand the systems that trap people into poverty. You can't choose to be born rich or poor. It's not always as simple as wanting to have a better life.

This entire thread reads about as tone deaf as republicans referring to all rioters as "thugs" or southerners that use words like "coon" on a regular basis. You can choose not to incorporate racist triggers in your day-to-day speech, or you can choose to be an asshole.

When a person has a history of referring to people as thugs and criminals you don't have to guess exactly which time they are being racist. When the topic is "racially disparate sentencing laws" you should know to be more careful with your words.

The only reason Bollaert's sentence is "so long" is because he was charged with 27 counts of identity theft and extortion. If he was charged with 1 count he would only have received ~8-12months. If you were charged with 27 murders the sentence would obviously be far longer. Why does this have to be explained?

Was this entire post /S? It's really hard to tell because it's so insane.

Glossing over that you can't seem to discuss liberals without feebly mocking them, which is quite childish and embarrassing... You honestly think the guy that spends hours responding to awards speeches and comedians and twitter posts and whines about crowd sizes in front of veteran memorials is "impervious to guilt trips and shaming"? I mean, that is just blindly ignorant to the reality of what is going on around you.

This guy is surgically cutting away at the very foundations of the globalist treason that nearly destroyed the West

How is putting the largest global corporations in charge of all of the government agencies "cutting away at globalist treason"?! Tariffs and trade wars aren't going to bring jobs back to the US, stop believing the lie.

because of how entrenched the neocons and looney libs are in their respective idiotic positions.

You realize that statements like this only destroy your credibility and any chance of rational conversation? They don't make you seem edgy or smart... they make you sound like an uninformed partisan hack.

It's only terrifying that you could possibly be excited about what he is doing and plans to do to the country.

It will be an "interesting time to be alive" when smart people rule the world. Maybe someday conservatives will realize that education and facts aren't their enemy. Until then, hold on to your butts.

It is incredible how many people are willfully aligning themselves with this white supremacist regime. That kind of shit used to embarrass people, now you're all proud of it.

TBH I don't find any of the arguments on that metabunk site to be very convincing. He takes an extremely unscientific look at counter-pointing the evidence that AE911 has actually put forth and basically doesn't prove anything more than a person in the street yelling and pointing their finger. Half of his counterpoints are flat out ignoring eyewitness testimony or repeating himself.

I've seen far more convincing evidence (heck I've seen more convincing debunk videos) that there are problems and questions that need to be addressed regarding 911 than any debunking site has ever been able to provide.

Passports aren't fireproof, buildings don't collapse at free fall speed, trillions of dollars don't just disappear overnight, novice pilots can't perform advanced aerial maneuvers with giant commercial airliners... plane crashes leave debris... concrete steel lattice structures never collapsed due to a fire, except for that one time it happened three times in one afternoon for 2 different reasons? Plenty of problems that have no obvious answers, far more than anyone has been able to come up with excuses for..

You can sit in one of two buckets when it comes to 911. You either believe the Bush administration and the 911 Commission (who was busy lying to us about Iraq WMD's at the time) and their heavily redacted report that didn't even address key problems or even mention WTC7... or you believe that they may not be telling us the whole truth. There really is no in between.

Every single aspect of every 911 conspiracy you've ever heard don't have to be true for there to be problems with the official story. The worst thing that ever happened to the 911 Truth movement was Alex Jones getting involved and destroying any chance it might have had of gaining momentum.

I do find it sadly amusing that people who fancy themselves skeptical about political parties, elections, "the government" etc can be so easily led astray. The government is apparently lying to us about eeeeeverything else... just not 9/11? :p